Literary Nonfiction Editor Kristen Iversen

In “Ruin Porn”—surely one of the most intriguing essay titles in recent memory—Maya Jewell Zeller invites us into the powerful, darker spaces of writing and art: pain and revelation. Her voice, both vulnerable and unflinching, carries a lyric precision attuned to the smallest details of time and place, yet she asks us to consider cultural patterns and our own personal response and (implicit) engagement with class, poverty, and patriarchy. Zeller’s writing is grounded in the ordinary, yet each paragraph, each image, is a shock of insight and revelation. What distinguishes this essay is not only Zeller’s fine attention to craft, line by line, image by image, but her insistence that writing matters—that it can witness, unsettle, and endure. Our stories matter, the way in which we tell our stories matters as well, and thus “we invent something revelatory, something that survives.”

Artist’s Note

“Ruin Porn” is part of my forthcoming memoir, Raised by Ferns, which explores, in various essays, some of the threads brought up in this one: the beauty and terror living side by side in rural America; how poverty and privilege, sexuality and motherhood, education and wildness intersect with oppressive systems found in Christianity and late-stage capitalism. When I wrote “Ruin Porn” several years ago, it was the most terrifying disclosure of past trauma that I could manage; but being alive in 2025, inside our collective awareness of the constant and global violations of human rights, as well as my own life’s recent events, these experiences feel commonplace. Nevertheless, I hope this essay encourages other women to share their stories.

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Ruin Porn

The poison hemlock in Port Townsend grows above my head. Its stalks are lovely, straight, and green, and it ends in a spray of flowers like Queen Anne’s lace, or cow parsnip, and if you didn’t know how deadly it was, you might cut it for a vase, a homemade bouquet for someone you love.

I lean in to see a common brown snail climbing, the slime a glittery trail up the freckled path. Something’s off: I push the snail shell with a stick of broken yarrow until it drops, hollow, to the grass below. I realize that the snail dried up from the inside, became a ghost—a shell, a film of slime—clinging to the purple freckled stalk of toxic plant.

Sometimes snails climb trees to escape their ground predators. Though it’s dry in trees, there’s still enough humidity for them, about 80 percent of that near the earth. And here, where the fog doesn’t burn off until nearly noon, I imagine the woody stems are like Jack’s beanstalk, something these little spirally gods might climb to their own sort of heaven. Except once they reach it, they die.

Are these snails trying to escape something, and climbing the wrong staircase? Are they seeking ruin? Says a voice in the back of my head: Are they being dramatic?

*

I don’t know what might correctly characterize those snails’ intentions on the poison hemlock, but I’m curious. I’m willing to investigate, to consider the relationship between snail and stalk, between climbing into an attic or a barn loft or a tree to get away from the men below. Or climbing into a man’s arms to escape another man.

I am a woman in America, and everywhere is danger. One must be wary. I also know what it means to draw toward certain forms of ruin, to love them, even, for their familiarity, their lack of pretense. I too have found comfort in a crumbled castle and a ghost barn, those ones that rot from the inside so the skeleton stands, useless, except as the object of a photograph—or a safe place for a girl wandering the fields to hide from the downpouring rain, the thick shapes of men walking through the fog in the near dawn. I’m drawn back to these places, these ruins, because they form the imagistic, psychological core of me, but I also don’t want them to become anyone else’s porn. Take your camera elsewhere, part of me whispers, my eyes narrowed into scopes, spit forming on my tongue.

*

For years I resisted writing about poverty because I didn’t want to be anyone’s Ruin in the Centerfold. I wrote around it, highlighting what to me was most important: my discomfort with capitalism, even financial privilege, my desire to hold onto those aspects of my youth that made me who I am.

When I first wrote an essay about growing up in socioeconomic poverty but later living in a place with an HOA (homeowners association), I tried to write against the arc of poverty-to-success, naming what I was and what I had been by depicting what I wasn’t and would never be—writing that I wasn’t homeless as a child, despite not always having a permanent address; writing of my immense gratitude for natural spaces, my desire to share those spaces, to remain grounded. That essay, called “The Privilege Button,” garnered responses from a wide variety of people. Many of those coming from money called it eye-opening, and many others who, like me, sprouted from a lack of socioeconomic resources found it empowering; several people contacted me to say it had given them permission to write about their own pasts.

While I was and am grateful for these responses, I was also nervous when I embarked on a memoir of the same title—thinking I’d be able to write against stereotypes, against easily categorized notions of what “poverty” and “privilege” mean. But I could also tell that people interested in the memoir want(ed) me to work within the easily packaged, dominant genre of the poverty-to-privilege arc, the story of the American Dream.

Writing memoir is one way to steer the narrative, and it’s true that I’m more interested in being the subject than the object: the one with agency, who makes sense of the images, who creates the vision. I have no interest in perpetuating the tropes favored by Hollywood and New York Publishing. However, when I sit down to write, because I am writing about my life, and my life includes years in socioeconomic poverty, I must do so with the knowledge of commodification, the risk of misrepresentation.

The genre in which my writing might have found mainstream purchase is called poverty porn. Its lens is on the Beauty of Poverty, often oversimplifying, excerpting, and celebrating traits of those who live with less—materially, but also less access to education, health care, and other support resources. And though the pornification is more commonly applied as the gaze of our Western World on other nations, it’s also increasingly popular for Americans to turn that Othering gaze on their own communities: Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the rural Northwest. But that gaze isn’t comprehensive—it’s a gaze, after all, not a nuanced knowing, and it often ignores systems of oppression, intersectionalities, and the “third world status” the US gives its own people as it fetishizes specific groups or, worse, vilifies and/or makes caricatures of the members of those groups. It buys into the paradigms of colonizer-as-savior or educated-elite-as-superior.

When writers get candid about their rural, impoverished roots, I get nervous. Back in 2017 I barely made it past page three of Hillbilly Elegy before slamming the book shut and tossing it in the giveaway pile. In my visceral anger, I wanted to throw it through a window. But I hang onto the occasionally contained self I’ve built on top of the also-uncontained self, the one who would break something out of anger, whose child self-coping mechanisms involved outbursts of violence, things modeled for me with which I cannot make peace. Other parts of me chide:

“Don’t throw that stupid book; it would cost a month’s groceries to replace that window; you’ll be cold all winter; don’t be like your dad when he frightened you by throwing the chair through the pane, or the toaster across the kitchen—remember those coiled springs and your sorrow over no-more-toast?; you’re not the same desperate and angry ten-year-old who, in revenge and frustration, intentionally crashed your brother’s radio down the stairs, watching it clank into so many metal and plastic parts, after he stabbed your doll through the chest with a screwdriver . . .”

Even as I write details like this, reticent-me feels like maybe I’m selling out my childhood, revealing too much, oversimplifying it, excerpting it into true but out-of-context scenes—things that could possibly be seen as poverty porn; things that reveal my registers, my layers, my grammars and formative sociocultural responses. I have a system for checking myself: I send the writing to my sister, a UPS Store manager, who is incisive and full of humor, and who lived through the same childhood. Well, almost. No—not really. In her middle to high school years, our father was drinking less, and our parents had some cash flow to help when she needed things like pants for work, and shoes for sports, and band travel (and the flute that she played in band).

My sister, though, is also sensitive about revealing what to us feels private, what we were taught is private: our parents’ lives, our family secrets. Not because we had anything to hide—though we did: the illegal pot my dad smoked, and the fact that he later drove without a license—but because we worry about capitalizing on, and exploiting, our de-capitalized, anti-societal upbringing.

Sending the work to my sister has another advantage: she isn’t An Academic, so she’s not caught up in any kind of discipline-specific terminology; she’s influenced by larger culture but she isn’t interested in appropriating or even critically examining the appropriation of what to us wasn’t called poverty,it was simply our life. And she is interested in the story, and in portraying it with nuance and grace and realism—for an audience of people who didn’t experience it.

This last part is what my sister points out when we discuss my work. She says, “Whether or not you want to write this stuff, people want to read it. It might help them.” She tells me, “It isn’t porn if you don’t make it porn. Just tell it like it was—the sad with the other stuff.” When she says “the sad,” she doesn’t mean poverty—she means the universally human experience of sadness, something we all feel, and in our case, something we felt at times because we regretted not having things that allowed us to participate in a capitalist culture, one which operates around material and money.

Eating food from the garden isn’t sad; however, when the volleyball team stops on the way back from an away game at a McDonald’s, and your teammates all buy $1 sundaes and you can’t get one because you don’t have $1, and you don’t really mind but then someone says Ohhh why isn’t she getting one?—then you maybe feel sad? Or do you feel sad because you wish the team wasn’t choosing to reward themselves and bond with cheap non-ice-cream ice cream, and you don’t yet know how to say that without being further ostracized? Or do you feel sad because when you finally get back to the school, the parking lot is dark, your father is way past drunk, no one can pick you up, so you bum a ride home from a friend who lives near you on the backroads, even though her dad drove you home last time, and the time before, and it’s beginning to put an awkward strain on your friendship? Isn’t this what’s sad, that I’m writing this human thing—any teenager has an awkward story; it’s not original to feel left out or uncomfortable—but what I really fear is the reader who, in response, wants to give all children money for McDonald’s, a corporation that benefits from our addiction to salt and fats, that in turn benefits from preying on the next-to-poorest among us?

The answer, I want to tell this person, isn’t buying us all McDonald’s. It isn’t a simple matter of material goods. The answer is changing the culture, the education system, the access—or, is at least a team coach using her awareness, thinking about a wider variety of factors when she decides where on the two-hour, late drive home to stop the bus.

We need to be aware of stories not just as entertainment but as education. Thoughtful, textured portrayals—of a range of differences, large and small, across lives.

Put another way by my friend Dawn, who grew up in a similar financial situation as my sister and me, “People always want to know someone who looks and is perceived to be like them but carries scars.” Dawn, who works in academia as director of Evergreen State College’s Native Pathways Program, hits it on the head: Reading about poverty can elicit many responses in the reader— a visceral, vicarious gaze; pride that they haven’t experienced it; empathy; a desire to save.

There’s a healing impulse to writing and reading ruin porn, akin to why we share any story—to create community around it, to increase empathy. Fine. Except . . . I don’t want sympathy. My life is, and was, just fine. (Or it was, as I wrote this. Later, it will be Not Fine. Then fine again. Rinse, repeat.)

A portion of my tenderness around this subject is connected to traumas I experienced, some because of random chance, and some, maybe, because of poverty itself—the systems it creates, the systems it disallows, in ways that create settings in which people, especially women, could be hurt. For a long time I feared facing and writing about those traumas; I feared making them public, as do so many with visible vulnerabilities in a society that stigmatizes and punishes for them.

My sister says to go ahead, write it into the work. And she means the essays in which I talk about the scary parts of marrying someone whose nuclear family is so patriarchal, so oppressively Christian; the anxiety I experienced trying to navigate their worlds. Or I talk about how as children we had to “Pee in the Bucket”—a song our mother sang, to the tune of Sesame Street’s “C is for Cookie”—because we had no indoor plumbing.

But then I also want to make clear that it isn’t a big deal—we were kids, and lots of people in rural areas don’t have plumbing. So not transcendence porn—no; this isn’t that kind of story, either, even if it’s also true: Kid from a House with No Plumbing, Who Walks to the Outhouse by Day and Uses a Bucket By Night, becomes Tenured Academic.

My whole adult life, I’ve passed as middle class, blending in (if not fitting in), keeping a low profile about my roots, because I know what happens when people think they understand you—you surrender authority. You no longer control where the camera pans, where it zooms in.

When I apply my own gaze to my experiences, I don’t look down on them. I don’t see myself as transcendent now; I see myself living another version of my life. And I see my sister—who decided college wasn’t for her and went on to manage five UPS stores—as equally successful. Maybe more so, if we want to get technical, or to attach salary range to the definition of success. At the writing of this essay, she makes about $20K more than I do, gets holiday bonuses, and paid vacations; I use my breaks from teaching to do more work: catch up on writing, curriculum design, and other mentorship, professional service, and author-related tasks.

In working on a memoir, I struggled to nail down exactly, my character arc/​arrival. I realized I wanted to write into something new, by writing against other things. So I wrote against traditional narrative structures, against assumptions about what a memoir is and does, against the expectation of capitalism-as-solution or success-as-arrival and against poverty porn. I wrote against going into impoverished areas as a form of tourism, against the depiction of rural America as piles of rusty, broken vehicles or the unhinged trailer screendoors. That vision of generational struggle, social neglect is a facade; it’s what the viewer decides to see. It’s ruin porn; it’s holier-than-thou porn.

But . . . it gets complicated when the ruins begin to overlap and accrue, when you can’t categorize them within yourself, when they resist classification. Because I know beautiful ruin: My uncle’s house a patchwork of windows salvaged from junked cars, and his chicken coop the shell of a Volkswagen van. I know what it means to pull things from an old shed on someone else’s property and turn them into practical household items. And I know it’s trendy now: recycled art, junk deco, what the ’90s film Zoolander hilariously homage-parodied as Derelicte. Trash couture. It’s cool now to be eco-friendly. In the 1970s and ’80s and ’90s of my youth, it was grunge.

And I know physical ruin: the bathtub full of flood silt, falling through the floor of the rental farmhouse, the old boat on blocks turned into a club house.

But there’s another ruin that’s more difficult to place: when two fifteen-year-old girls are left unsupervised and one of their “uncles” (a family friend close enough to feel like family) makes a move on them both. Look at these innocent horse girls bred for my midlife crisis. It’s complicated—is it ruin porn?

And, thinks the part of me that’s still a product of this American culture, my own complicity in sexism, haven’t I always tempted ruin? It’s in my almost-immigrant blood, the portion of self that isn’t native to this land, that knows there is a cellular, cultural disjunctive keeping me from being what the primal, unfiltered part of me thought my child-self was—of this soil, part of the web of watershed; not the pastoral but the born-into, one-with. No, I’m more like the naturalized plants—those that come in and make it a home, that root and bear new shoots. I’m the new shoots. I don’t know anything before this, but as it turns out, I might be complicit in the ruin.

*

So I’m going to try to tell a few ruins as they are, without adding lace or artifice. I’ll leave them in the margins, not put them in the middle of the stapled seam.

In the salal and western hemlock (the tree, not poisonous stalk—see how closely ruin resembles grace?) that surrounded our home, several junked cars imagined themselves still fully metal, un-oxidized. They came in on tow ropes and cables, winched from the highways and back roads, my dad yelling in the rain.

Or where I was born: a gas station, upstairs, a chain-sawed hole in the floor letting the wood stove’s alder-cedar heat up into the space where my mother nursed me, the forest and ocean’s ions wafting in the window along with the gasoline fumes and the clucks of chickens. Marijuana blurring the wild into the domestic.

Or back in the barn, the rafters swinging down their long arms to meet me as I climbed the mushroomed hay, my legs cut up from grass and thistle and blackberry, my hair tangled and full of field-stubble; the exploding fecundity of post-flood treasures; and like its own grotesque fireworks blossoming in my brain, a dead cow bloated, until, watching the filmy, fly-eaten eye, the distended belly and the legs stiff as a lollipop stem, I poked that animal with a stick, afraid it would explode on my face, hoping it would.

Sometimes I wonder what exactly made me, what combination of flourish and rot.

Sometimes I dream myself back in the rental house we lived in on those fifty acres of floodplain, with the floor falling through in the bathroom so the tub had faulty drainage and backed up with silt during the high water, when the river welled up.

Those who are from a place don’t see its scenery—or its people—the same way an external viewer does. I lived a portion of my childhood in Southwest Washington, land historically inhabited by Kathlamet people, a Chinook tribe, and later a Finnish logging and farming settlement, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its covered bridge. I remember playing in the river there, one of our swimming holes, where a rope hung from the underbelly of the bridge, swung out from the cement into the shaded water; the smell of tar and heat and then the splash when we hit the surface and submerged, swimming to shore and emerging, dripping, sun through the droplets, to see that rare tourist who turned off Rural Route 4 on their way to the coast to ogle the charming construction, walking the gravel pull-out and watching us splash and kick and crawl up the blackberry banks. The tourists smiling like they were on a movie set, and we were the extras, convenient local kids cast in the roles of playing ourselves.

But that pastoral, covered-bridge community you might see a glimpse of in real life (or in tourism materials) is not how everyone lived it. The camera doesn’t pan back in time before Captain Gray arrived in 1792, nor in panning forward does it pause on what matters to the girl living those fields and roads in the 1990s—it doesn’t offer a nuanced portrait of even the now. In a lot of rural porn, you get pastoralism or poverty. But what’s real is, of course, somewhere in between. And neither, not both. As my sister says, the sad [complicated] with the other stuff. The other stuff, and the sad, too, are complicated.

*

In my teenage mind, it was easy to associate from one known thing to another—the poison stalk, the desire to climb, or the twisted stair, the curiosity of descent. How easily I believed I was complicit in what happened to me. How the story turns, like a kaleidoscope, shapes that are both beautiful and unclear.

*

When I was thirteen, living in a rental house in Wahkiakum County, I found stacks of skin mags in the subfloor. A crack at the bottom of the wall left a gap where the paneling didn’t meet the floorboards, and when I dropped a necklace in there, I lay down on my belly—and my newly budding breasts—to fish it out. I reached in, afraid of what living or dead animal I might touch. My hand met something like books—no, like National Geographic (the delightful magazines I took home from the library free bin!) —and thrilled that I might get some new pictures of panthers or underwater-scapes, I pulled out handfuls. There were about a dozen or more—Hustler, Playboy, others I can’t recall. I read them and learned a lot about sex and the male gaze, not knowing that’s what it was called, but I also read some very interesting literary fiction. I was thrilled with the new experiences of language but also interested in how a woman would sit, her legs sprawled, showing us that pink series of labial folds and her vagina, a pose I found both vulgar and brave.

Whenever I ran out of library materials, I’d revisit the magazines in the floor. I even grew attached to a few of them, their stories forming the ways I saw the world. I must have read them all cover to cover by the time we left that rental, two years later, my body having learned its own patterns of blood and beginning to feel more than budding desire, more than simple curiosity at what was described so vividly. Not wanting to get caught, I simply left the pile where I’d discovered them, like a feature of the house that came preinstalled—wood stove, refrigerator, pornography.

After my family moved out, and my best friend’s father and brothers moved in (rentals are few in rural communities like ours), the youngest brother happened upon the glossy trove beneath the wall, and the family decided that they’d been right about me all along: I had been a perverted middle schooler and now I must be an even pervier high schooler. I was a “sinful whore who needed to repent” and their (Christian) daughter was NOT going to be spending time with me, not if they could help it. I didn’t bother to correct them. Who was I to turn their gaze? And, my young mind wondered, hadn’t I read the mags? Wasn’t I bad? Or wasn’t I at least exactly who they thought I was?

It was 1995; I’d been to church and I’d been to school and I’d been to enough fishing docks and logging shows and county fairs to know there were only a few options. We didn’t have sex-positive education or the internet. We had rural role modeling, the whore/​Madonna complex, implied in the conversations men had about women, and that women had about those of us who didn’t come back to church. I wasn’t a very committed Christian, so they concluded that I must be a whore, or would become one later on. I shrugged; having read The Scarlet Letter, I knew I didn’t believe in binaries—I just didn’t know yet how to fully call out the hypocrisy, the pitfalls of righteously cast shame.

Later, fleeing her abusive step-mom, their daughter and I stole her father’s car and hid out in the attic of a house while the police lights flashed red and blue outside, strobing the night, saying That sort-of-whore (virgin-me) and her not-a-whore friend (virgin-her) are up there, just beyond the crumbling carpet stairs, and they’re aware of what they can do to men to ruin them.

*

Of what men could do to them.

*

Of what it means to be fifteen and considered a whore when you are really a victim of a culture, of pastoralism, of a man in his thirties, of his mid-life crisis or lack of ethics, how complicated it is when he gets to know you, how he acts silly and fun—horse rides, paint wars, practical jokes—until you trust him, is the one who kisses you, when you say quietly, “I’m not on birth control; I’ve never had sex,” and he says, “Don’t worry; I’m not going to get you pregnant; I just want to teach you how to kiss”; when he writes you letters for over a year after this, paying close attention, never going beyond that, and you trust him, so that when you ride the Greyhound a year later, and another man close to his age approaches you, you’re used to being treated as if you’re being groomed; you don’t know what “tease” means; after all, the family friend/​uncle/​trusted-person only kissed you twice, after months of joking and talking and paying attention; so this man on the bus just wants to be your friend. Men in their mid- to late-thirties and forties, you learn very young, are scared (of mortality? of absence?) and will find anyone who looks vulnerable. There is a certain type of girl-woman on whom they prey. The kind that looks like she hides porn magazines in her floor. She is aware of sex, curious about pleasure, she’s hiding it poorly, she wants to learn. That man knows to say, My favorite music artist is Sting (“Don’t stand so close to me”—you know it?—as he moves across the aisle to her seat, so she can hear him better),to say Ti Si Glupa, to say Don’t worry, I’m a teacher, to ask what she thinks of his country, his language. This man imagines she wants it so he believes she wants it. She wants it bad in her sweet flowered dress and her strappy sandals. She wants it bad in her little denim jacket, embroidery on the pockets. She wants it bad when she falls asleep. Reading her novels and writing in her journal and listening to her Discman. Looking out the window coyly he smiles.

*

I thought it was my fault, so I didn’t tell anyone.

I didn’t tell anyone about my friend’s family friend because nothing really happened. And he was kind. And he kept writing to me when he left town, so clearly we were friends. I could be cool. But when his letters gave me instructions for where to meet him when I turned eighteen, I stopped writing back.

I didn’t tell anyone about the man on the bus, because hadn’t I talked to him all day? Hadn’t I listened to him talk, about Croatia and his travels and his music? Hadn’t I been interested in the conversation?

*

Didn’t I ask for it, poking the dead cow with a stick, for the entrails and maggots?

*

In rural areas, there are informal social controls, less access to media, a greater isolation from resources. There is little anonymity. There is a distrust of authority/assistance, and there is an implicit code that in order to survive, you keep your dirty laundry to yourself. You keep even yourself to yourself.

*

I learned to shy away from men, from showing anyone the cars and barn and the field and rust and history. To only be curious when alone, to keep curiosity and textured shadow hidden under an aura of Not Needing Help.

I learned that poison hemlock isn’t safe for snails—even their thick, anti-toxic mucus membrane can’t save them. The one I saw should have stayed on the ground or crawled up something else.

*

I learned that I can’t protect other people, or animals, from pain. That I can say the truth on the safety of a page, in the middle as well as the margins. And that your own story isn’t porn if you are the one telling it.

That your story—every story—defies tidy charts. There isn’t one right way to share a narrative—there isn’t one narrative—and what looks like ruin might be metamorphosis, and what looks like success might be suffering, and what looks like a settled life might be, well, might not be any of our business. Or maybe it is a story, just not ready to be told. As a writing professor, I tell my students we can choose which parts to share, and we can share them in our own shapes. We can mesh different things together and think about them in new ways each time. In doing so, we invent something revelatory, something that survives.

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Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays Raised by Ferns (Porphyry Press, 2026); the lyric exploration The Wonder of Mushrooms (Adventure Publications, 2025); and several poetry collections, including Out Takes/Glove Box (New American Press, 2023), selected by Eduardo Corral as winner of the New American Poetry Prize. Learn more via Maya’s Substack, Spores from the Northwest.